Could we do without healing Potency?

[LeonKeyh]

No, I agree with Dzian's stance. If I wanted to play a dps I'd play a dps not a healer. Does that mean I won't dps at all in a fight? absolutely not. What I want as a healer is not to fill my 90% down time doing dps with more dps buttons!!! I don't want more dps buttons. I want less down time.

I get it that SE for some Twelvesforsaken reason doesn't want to address this issue, and thus more dps buttons to press would "fix" said issue. My thing is, no. I don't want to settle. And I shouldn't have to either.

That's a fair request, but until that happens, the expectation is for healers to do DPS when they're not healing.

Calling that "down time" is subjective. Tank's job is to hold aggro on an enemy and use mitigation skills. It's not "downtime" when they have enough enmity and a mitigation buff is rolling, but there's nothing else for them to do within their role's unique responsibilities. They're expected to continue to DPS because DPS is ultimately a majority of everyone's role in a group in addition to other responsibilities depending on your role.

Healers aren't somehow exempt from that because of expectations from other games or because of personal expectations based off the name of the role. It only _seems_ like downtime because of the extremely simplistic game play surrounding that portion of the role.

[Absurdity]

Though I'll admit, most of the actual GCD kits aren't terribly interesting to begin with, so it's not as if I'd like having to turn to them in their current iterations.

Neither are the oGCDs in most cases. There is basically no interaction between 90% of the abilities in a healer's kit, be it GCDs or oGCDs and oGCDs mostly boil down to "Restore X amount of HP instantly"

[Jaelommiss]

Neither are the oGCDs in most cases. There is basically no interaction between 90% of the abilities in a healer's kit, be it GCDs or oGCDs and oGCDs mostly boil down to "Restore X amount of HP instantly"

Absolutely this. The only healing abilities I can think of that have depth beyond 'push button, get heal/regen/shield' are Plenary and Horoscope. Maybe Earthly Star and Excog if we count special trigger conditions as a type of complexity.

[ASkellington]

That's a fair request, but until that happens, the expectation is for healers to do DPS when they're not healing.

Calling that "down time" is subjective. Tank's job is to hold aggro on an enemy and use mitigation skills. It's not "downtime" when they have enough enmity and a mitigation buff is rolling, but there's nothing else for them to do within their role's unique responsibilities. They're expected to continue to DPS because DPS is ultimately a majority of everyone's role in a group in addition to other responsibilities depending on your role.

Healers aren't somehow exempt from that because of expectations from other games or because of personal expectations based off the name of the role. It only _seems_ like downtime because of the extremely simplistic game play surrounding that portion of the role.

First off, I never said healers were exempt nor have I said healers weren't expected to do DPS.

My enjoyment of the healer role is balancing both dps and healing. What I am saying is the healing portion of fights need to be changed. Not the dps. What I am saying is that giving me an extra 2-5 dps buttons to press does not, will not, cannot fix my enjoyment of the role so no, no I don't want it. We can do 30% of our time dps. We can do 40%. Hells for all I care we can do 60%. 90% however, isn't fun at least for me and giving me more options is not how you fix it.

[Semirhage]

Is it possible for them to reduce downtime and turn the downtime activity into something other than Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare? Both? Both is good.

[Manuka]

... We can do 30% of our time dps. We can do 40%. Hells for all I care we can do 60%. 90% however, isn't fun at least for me and giving me more options is not how you fix it.

I hate to say it but the likelihood of them ever pushing that level of healing pressure outside of ultimates is almost zero. You have to keep in mind that the healers spending 90% of their time doing damage are usually skilled healers in equally skilled groups that have already memorized the mechanics and have their CDs planned out. If downtime was reduced to the point those selfsame healers are needing to spend +40% of their time on healer gcds, then your midcore and casual groups are just gonna get slapped around and bullied because downtime is designed to allow those groups to recover from mistakes in-between sets of mechanics. The more you reduce that window the more fights become a series of jump rope mechanics where everybody has to play optimally or wipe. And the dev team know this since the last time they tried to push content to that degree was back during Gordias and to a lesser extent Midas and anyone who was around then can tell you what an unmitigated disaster it was, as the raiding community more or less collapsed from it.

As it stands improving our dps kits is probably the easiest solution to downtime boredom, cause I really can't see them changing the content difficulty.

[Liam_Harper]

I'd like to see more healing uptime, but it's still a fact that as we become geared and in groups with perfect mitigation planning, it's unavoidable that we end up with a fair bit of downtime. Fights have to be designed to be possible at min ilv prog. For that reason, engaging downtime filler other than healing is important. The other issue is that SE's idea of more healing is just to make raidwides or a brief set of mechanics hit really, really hard but leave the long stretches of downtime intact. E11s/E12s are perfect examples of this, sometimes you need to crack out the GCD heals/shields/mitigation for huge chunks of damage, other times you're safe for 30+ seconds. Also SE seem very hesitant to apply increased healing requirements on anything but the last boss of the Savage tier. They claimed to have bumped damage in Eden's Promise, but e9s and e10s are basically a joke to heal with gear/planning, to say nothing about Normal.

Absolutely this. The only healing abilities I can think of that have depth beyond 'push button, get heal/regen/shield' are Plenary and Horoscope. Maybe Earthly Star and Excog if we count special trigger conditions as a type of complexity.

I like Diurnal bubble too in how you get a few sec of mitigation on flash for raidwides. For something like Diurnal/WHM e12s, catching both DD and Earthen Fury casts is essential. Who knows what they'll do to that now Noct is going. Horoscope is good but Plenary is poor design in that it has to be used just before a weave window (if using Rapture).